Check mate. With those words, artists Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst struck up a 34-year relationship over a game of chess in Tanning’s New York City studio.
A self-portrait, Birthday, had caught Ernst’s eye. It shows her in a hallway full of open doors, her blouse open, revealing her chest, winged chimera squatting on the floor in front of her, like a pet. It was catnip to Dada pioneer Ernst, who swung by her studio in 1942, looking to collect works by surrealist women painters, and spotted it on an easel.
As Tanning put it, “It was snowing hard when [Ernst] rang the doorbell. Choosing pictures for a show … he was a willing emissary to the studios of a bouquet of pretty young painters who, besides being pretty, which they couldn’t help, were also very serious about being artists.”
The couple lived in Sedona, Arizona; Paris, and the French countryside. All the while, Tanning painted surrealist images, made soft sculpture, and, in time, became a published author of poetry, two memoirs, and a novel. She lived to be 101.
In 2007, Mia acquired her Tempest in Yellow painting, created in 1956 when she had turned away from surrealism’s typically precise rendering and toward a looser, more suggestive style. She called these new works “prism” paintings, and later “insomnias,” dream spaces inhabited by vague forms.
—written with Diane Richard, Mia editor
“Women at Work” celebrates Women’s History Month by highlighting female artists in Mia’s collection.
Images: (left) Photograph by Lee Miller, 1955 © Lee Miller Archives; mage on right: (right) Detail of Tempest in Yellow in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art © Estate Dorothea Tanning / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York